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Your images are probably photographs from a digital camera or scanned pictures. Either way, you should choose the .JPG (also called JPEG) file format as the output. It uses a compression technique that reduces the file size without significant loss in picture quality. This is why it is used so much on the Internet: smaller file sizes mean faster transmission on the web and download to web browsers faster, especially important to those with slow connections.

What if your image is in a different format like, say, TIF (TIFF) or BMP? The software with your digital camera or scanner should be able to convert it to JPG. If not, there are some FREE image editing programs that you can download from the web. One is IrfanView:

It can convert your graphic files to many formats and can do a lot of other things, like sharpening, change brightness/contrast, gamma correction and so on. Just use the program to open your image and under the "File" menu choose the option "Save as:". Then, in the dialog window click on the small arrow at the right of "Save as a type:" until you see the "JPG - JPEG Files" option.

Clicking on the "Options" tab let you also choose the degree of compression. The more the file is compressed, the more loss of quality the picture will suffer: it's best to ignore it and leave the conversion at the default level.

A 100 Kb file can show a lot of detail, more than most computer monitors can display, and there is no need to use files any larger than this (Kb, or Kilobytes are the units of measure for computer files. You should see the Kb level of your image under the "Image information" or "Image properties" of your editing software).

2. IMAGE SIZE:

The average monitor resolution used is of 800 x 600 and an image of 800 x 600 pixels will completely fill the screen. An image of 400x300 pixels will be only one-fourth the file size (in Kb), and is still a pretty large image on a screen. So, another way to reduce a large image file is to resize it. In your image editing program you should usually find the "Resize" option under the "Image" menu.

Generally we are dealing with pictures of rectangular, vertical objects (RUGS!). A picture with an horizontal size of 500 pixels shows a lot of detail. Hardly any of the images you see on Turkotek is more than 500 pixels wide..

CONCLUSION:

Using the jpg file type and an appropriate image size you should produce some perfectly readable images with a file size between 30 and 75 Kb.
The images you see on our site are almost never wider than 600 pixels or of file sizes greater than 100 Kb.
Now e-mail your images as attachments to us. We will put them into our server and send you simple instructions on how to make them appear, as if by magic, in your messages.

Time goes and monitor sizes and resolution grows, I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be okay to raise the size of uploaded photo ? The photo illustrations are for me a very valuable part of the discussions here at Turkotek

Which means that now we can increase the horizontal size of the pictures, but not too much, otherwise we will be obliged to scroll horizontally our screen to see an image that is too wide.
Yesterday, for example, somebody linked to a very large (in width) photo from another website. It didn’t fit on my screen, so I downloaded, resized and uploaded it to our server (changing appropriately its link).

Just now, I resized and recompressed seven pictures for the current Salon. They had a width between 777 and 1099 pixels, for a total file size of 4061 kB.
I processed them to a width between 600 and 800 pixels for a total file size of 1154 kB.

In short, that’s what I am doing now: using a width between 550 pixels (for long, narrow and vertical pictures) and 600/800 for the more square ones, depending also on the amount of details that they are supposed to show. Also the amount of jpeg compression applied depends on the quality of the picture and the level of detail.

So, I am keeping now the file size from a little above 100 kB to under 200 kB, with an average “weight” of around 150 kB or even less. Bigger than that, it’s just a waste of bandwidth and server space.
Regards,

I agree, and have been doing that for awhile, with one exception: I reduce the width of detail images to 450 pixels. Most of them are less than one-fourth of the width of the whole piece, some are less than one-tenth of it. The 450 pixel width gives very good detail.

Most monitors can handle extra width, but not all of them can. The other significant factor, maybe even more important, is the speed of the user's connection. Pages with numbers of very large image files (large file size, not necessarily image dimensions) take longer to download and can even cause internet service providers (satellite services) to reduce the download speeds for 24 hours. I doubt that anyone is still on dialup connections, but 3G is very slow, 4G is somewhat better, and cable providers vary a lot.

I am new to the forum and struggling to upload pictures from my computer to the site as it expects for it to be a url or already uploaded? Am I doing something wrong or not using the right feature? I read there is an option I could email these and these would then appear? I tried but was unable to find an email address? I apologise for the incovenience

Sorry for the confusion. If you send the image files to me (as JPG, preferably), I'll edit them as necessary, put them into our server, and send you instructions for making them display in messages that you post. My email address is sprice@vcu.edu.